Soma

Soma is the one Vedic offering that is also a god. The substance is a juice pressed from the stalks of a plant, strained and mixed and then poured into the fire and drunk by the officiating priests. The god Soma is that same juice addressed in the second person, praised while it is still running through the filter. The two are not a metaphor for one another; the hymns move between them without marking a change of subject.

Mandala 9 of the Rigveda holds one hundred and fourteen hymns to Soma Pavamana, Soma being purified, and almost all of them describe a single moment, the passage of the liquid through the woollen strainer into the vessels below. The poets reach for every image they have for it: a king riding to his throne, a bull bellowing, a horse let out to run, rivers going down to the sea. No other Vedic substance is given a book of the collection to itself.

The drink belongs above all to Indra. He is said to drink it before he kills Vritra and releases the held waters, so the sacrifice is not a commemoration of that act but the supply line for it, and the priests understood themselves to be strengthening a god who had work to do. Human drinkers speak in the first person too. One much quoted passage has the speaker announce that he has drunk the soma, become immortal, reached the light and found the gods. Whether that is a report of intoxication, an expression of ritual exaltation or a formal claim the rite entitles him to make is argued, and the hymn does not settle it.

The pressing sat at the centre of a large public ceremony, and the later Srauta manuals classify whole rites by how many pressing days they run. The Agnistoma, the model one day soma sacrifice, is still performed.

The Rigveda never identifies the soma plant, and the tradition itself lost it. The Brahmanas already legislate for substitutes, naming plants to be used when soma cannot be had, which means the question was open inside the ritual literature long before any modern scholar asked it. What the hymns supply instead is a set of constraints. The plant grows in the mountains and is brought from far away. It consists of stalks or shoots, which are crushed for their juice. Root, leaf, flower, seed and fruit are never mentioned, in a body of poetry that is otherwise minutely attentive to plants.

Three candidates have serious advocates and none has carried the field. R. Gordon Wasson argued in 1968 for the fly agaric mushroom, a body with no root or leaf, and read certain passages as describing the drinking of urine, which would fit the Siberian practice built on the fact that the mushroom's active compound passes through the body largely unchanged. The objections are that the fly agaric grows with birch and pine rather than on the plains where the hymns were composed, and that its heavy, sleep shot action matches the texts poorly.

Ephedra has continuity on its side. The living Zoroastrian ceremony presses ephedra for haoma, the Avestan cognate of soma, and the plant grows in the right uplands. The objection is pharmacological: ephedra is a stimulant and is not visionary, which sits awkwardly beside the exaltation the hymns describe.

Flattery and Schwartz argued in 1989 for Syrian rue, whose seeds carry beta carbolines that are genuinely psychoactive. The objection is that across its whole range the plant is burned as a fumigant rather than pressed for juice.

The atlas records all three and picks none.